Thanks to the efforts of the Gang of 19, Denver became one of the first cities in the country with accessible mass transit. The protests from the ADAPT community, however, didn't end there. 

As the Denver Public Library notes in a 2015 article about the Gang of 19, "the second major wave of ADAPT protests targeted Social Security, health care policies, and Medicaid. Their ultimate goal was to obtain government support for attendant care and independent living funds. Eventually, ADAPT began protesting restaurants, schools, parking lots, post offices, housing communities, casinos, churches, and more. Wherever wheelchairs could not go, ADAPT was there to take action and demand access."

In present-day, RTD says it "holds accessibility as a core value in all of the agency’s work."

But the activists' work hasn't stopped. In 2020, during a summer dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, we spoke with Dawn Russell, an organizer for the nonprofit Atlantis Community Inc., about how there is still more work to be done to achieve independent living for people with disabilities.

“No matter if it was 1978 or 2020, we’re working hard to honor what the Gang of 19 did,” Russell told Rocky Mountain PBS. “We hope that we’re honoring that by fighting all of these decades later.”